Taxpayers Will Pay $1 Million to Tear Down $18 Million Baseball Stadium That Predictably Failed to Rejuvenate Camden

If they were forced to invest their personal money in these schemes, they would never happen.

But there’s no consequences for wasting taxpayer money.

Speaking in 2000 at the groundbreaking for a minor league baseball stadium in Camden, New Jersey, then-Governor Christine Todd Whitman reached for the most obvious cliche possible.

The state’s economic development authorities, she said, had “heard the message from the movie, Field of Dreams: ‘If you build it, they will come.'”

“Well, soon we will see a field of dreams right here in Camden, and my prediction is ‘they will come,'” Whitman said.

Taxpayers spent more than $18 million to build the stadium that would eventually be named Campbell’s Field, as part of a minor league ballpark-building frenzy across New Jersey that saw similar stadiums erected in Newark, Atlantic City, and Somerset—all part of redevelopment schemes that attracted independent minor league teams (that is, minor league teams not affiliated with the Major League Baseball farm system).

Less than two decades later, taxpayers in New Jersey will pay another $1 million to tear down Campbell’s Field.